Drama Tuesday - Australian Curriculum: The Arts Plus ça change? Oui ou non!

  Australia has two versions of The Australian Curriculum. 

• The Australian Curriculum The Arts (Version 8.4)

• Australian Curriculum V9

Curriculum is contested space. There are too many political fingers in the pie - particularly in the so-called culture wars. The suspicious caste who see a shadow conspiracy lurking in every word have focused mostly on their versions of history and English and largely ignore the Arts. Indifference can be a blessing – particularly in expecting an arts curriculum to be implemented. 

Does this revision of the Arts curriculum make a difference?

At one level, there is consistency. At another level there is significant change that should be noted.

What stays the same?

The Curriculum provides a fundamental commitment to an arts education for all young Australians: “The Arts curriculum is written on the basis that all students will study The Arts from Foundation to the end of Year 8”.

But there is the weasel qualification: “State and territory school authorities or individual schools will determine how the curriculum is implemented”.

There is still a commitment to

Getting action beyond pleasant platitudes and meaningful arts education is always a challenge. 

Where should we be awake to changes?

The V.9 Arts Curriculum must not be understood as “business as usual”.

• The Strands of the curriculum have changed.

• There are implicit shifts in what is highlighted and valued throughout the whole document.

Consider the Strands of the two versions:

The naming of parts is more than “silent, eloquent gestures” (as the Henry Reed poem reminds us). What we call things matters. How we organise our thoughts matter. 

Teachers work from familiar patterns – habits of thinking or mind, if you will. For the past few years we have trained ourselves to plan and teach using one paradigm (for better or worse) and now the world of thought is changed. 

This is more than semantics. Nor is it just a re-visiting of the many arguments amongst the advisory community – for those with long memories the responses to Shape of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA 2010) included different structuring organisation. For example, 

“Queensland supports the proposition that there are three processes — generating, realizing and responding — that can organise art form learning and the recursive nature of arts learning and arts processes. This reflects existing practice in Queensland”.  

That three part structure has resonances in Version 9 strands. The Western Australian Curriculum Framework (1998) identified four learning outcomes (which have some overlap with Version 9 strands):

1. Arts Ideas: “Students generate arts works that communicate ideas.” (p. 53)

2. Arts Skills and Processes: “Students use the skills, techniques, processes, conventions and technologies of the arts.” (p. 54)

3. Arts Responses: “Students use their aesthetic understanding to respond to reflect on and evaluate the arts.” (p. 56)

4. Arts in Society: “Students understand the role of the arts in society.” (p. 57)

Version 9 is more than just re-working of the previous version. It is a radical conceptual re-think. More than that, there is the shift in focus on making the arts – exploring/practices and skills/creating and making/presenting and performing – and a downplaying of responding.

In writing this, I am not defending the simplistic making/responding model. For all its catchy two part structure, it was flawed.  But what I am trying to highlight is that when you change the ways that we think about a curriculum structure, we change the curriculum. 

Perhaps, the only saving grace is that the actual implementation of the previous versions of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts have had such limited success that these changes will slip by unnoticed. 

No curriculum is worth anything unless it is implemented. 

What we have had in successive versions of Arts Curriculum in Australia has not been a failure to write good curriculum, but a failure to implement what is developed. 

I urge everyone to read the new version of the Arts Curriculum, with an eye looking back to what was valuable in the past (not forgetting what’s in state/territory documents as well). But also reading Version 9 with criticality and connoisseurship (to invoke Eisner). 

We need to ask ourselves two questions:

1. What changes and what stays the same?

2. Do the changes matter to a successful arts education for every young Australian?

Bibliography

Costa, A. L., & Kallic, B. (2000-2001). Habits of Mind. Retrieved from http://www.habits-of-mind.net/

Eisner, E. W. (2002). What can eduction learn from the arts about the practice of education? John Dewey Lecture for 2002, Stanford University. Retrieved from www.infed.org/biblio/eisner_arts_and_the_practice_or_education.htm . Last updated: April 17, 2005.

Drama Tuesday - A little manifesto from 1996

Education paradoxically is both notoriously conservative and dangerously revolutionary – and mostly at the same time. Who would want to repeat the abject aridity of teaching english without literature, language without context. Who would want to teach the arts without the disciplines, lost in some abandoned contested territory. In affirming the value of conserving values in Arts education, we recognise the strengths of traditions and past contexts and cultures for their power to inform this moment in time. IN looking forward we recognise opportunities in new technologies. We value innovation and engage with it.

Think about the links between societies of impending change. What happened in societies where the sickle was invented. What is happening in our society where other technologies are changing the ways we tell stories, express ideas and communicate.

The world is not schematically simplistic – conservatism on one side dialectically opposed to brave new worlders. If it was, then the future would be written by soap opera outliners. We need a world view that recognises and celebrates complexity and exploits it rather than fights against it. The world is essentially muddy and we need to silt the mirky marshiness to make sense of our ways forward.

In case you haven’t noticed, the ways young people tell stories is changing. 

There are implications for education.

There are implications for the Arts. 

To make judgments we need shift our frames of reference. 

Instead of building a thumping pulpit of judgment – sickling tall poppies – let’s develop a climate that supports innovation, encourages questioning, values divergence and complexity and celebrates those who shift the focus. 

In case you haven't noticed, the ways young people tell stories are changing. The stories are none the less important nor the telling of them. But the influences of video clips, MTV, interactive multi-media, television and other advertising, new and evolving technologies, are re-shaping both the ways young people make sense of the world and the ways they express themselves.

Old hierarchies and orthodoxies are breaking down, new technologies make fresh links and connections, find new pathways; topics, themes and points of view are different; there are marked shifts back and forth along the objectivity-subjectivity continuum; the process of telling the story is as important as the story artefact. There's a useful image doing the popular rounds at the moment - surfing in hyperspace and that is an apt image for the process of developing an original piece of youth theatre for the 1995 Festival of Perth, called somewhat enigmatically: Here! Now!

This joint project of the Leeming Youth Theatre, WA Youth Jazz Orchestra and STEPS Youth dance Company has been an example of some of these key elements. Bringing together young people from three different but related backgrounds was only the beginning of a sustained collaboration.

Over almost eighteen months, participants have been asked to work from within their own discipline to reach out and make connections with other arts forms: dancers to use their voices as well as their bodies, actors to move, musicians to act and move. But more significantly, the process has focused on young people taking a driving role in the creation of the work. Ideas

have been sifted, explored, developed and shaped by the collective work of the members of the collaborative ensemble. The role of the adults collaborators - director, musical director, collaborator and dramaturgs - has been shaped by the driving wave of the ideas of young people.

To make a judgement about this project - and its short and long term effectiveness - we need to make a shift to a different frame of reference. This work has given rise to the awkward but accurate buzz phrase of the moment is "hybrid arts". While there's always a danger of overstating early trend signs, the work on the stage (can we even use that term any more?)

reflects a significant perceptual shift in story. There are implications for education. There are implications for the Arts. The process has been as fascinating as any product on the stage. The impact of the process on the dramatic text is notable. There is that crowding of ideas, conflicting values, elisions of narrative, experimentation with type, archetype and cliche characters from soap opera and worse. 

All involved have had to acknowledge and incorporate the ideas, values and limitations of an empowered group of young people. This has meant an intrinsically different way of working. As young people have been asserting their voice, style and approach to the product, the process has shifted from a hierarchical (sometimes seen as masculine) way of working to a collaborative approach. Writers, dramaturges and: directors have had to come to terms with different ways of working, different ways of telling , different forms and structures of narrative. As young people have been empowered b y the process, there has been a serious re-evaluation of the creative partnerships between adults and young artists. This sort of empowerment will lead to a questioning of the traditionally power laden role of the director - and teacher as director.

Can these young people ever go back to the theatre where actors are cattle (to remind us of Hitchcock's famous quip?. 

What is the role of the actor in the creation of the dramatic text? 

What is now the role of the writer and what are the limits and frustrations that are placed on that role? 

Can we ever again see the playwright as arbitrator on all matters as we find in the, say, the proscriptive and rather quaintly literary scripts of a George Bernard Shaw? 

Can the drama class be a tabula rasa for the teacher to scrawl and experiment on? 

Are drama students to be manipulated and pushed around?

In short, the obvious answer to these questions is no. There has been a significant paradigm shift. The debate that still needs to be faced centres on the question of whether this shift in thinking is desirable, general, irreversible? How will drama courses look if this empowerment of the ideas and values of young people is a general shift? What happens if there develops a number of approaches - ones that favour empowerment and ones that retain a dominant (writer/ director/ etc) and subservient role (the sort of master-student relationship so often seen in the traditional approach in the ballet studio)? What will happen when this generation of young actors enters the profession and runs headlong into that other tradition? Is this case being overstated? What are the limitations of the student actor as writer/creator/participant, controller of the creative text that emerges? Is there sufficient aesthetic distance m the process to enable ideas to be taken in, massaged, developed and realised.

What is happening in terms of the art of story is even more fascinating. The nature of story 1s changing m the face of many pressures. Dramatic texts such as Here!Now! reflect these shifts. By nature, the story is now more dynamic - in jargon terms, it is more interactive: the participants in the process have a role in the creation of meaning and the manipulation of what happens. The days of the "sanctity" of the text are numbered. As reader response theorists win the hearts and minds battle for education, so too do the ways stories are told by young people.

This is a (if not “the') cutting edge of narrative. When people try to apply different more traditional frames of reference, they find themselves confounded or perplexed or even confronted. To a mind set brought up on the well-made story, crafted and honed and even elegant, the roughness and unfinished qualities of stories like Here!Now! are questioned - perhaps even an anathema. But, it is timely to remember Peter Brook's exhortation to rough theatre where immediacy is more important than finish.

If you make an analysis of Here/Now! it is a thin narrative - that is not to say that there is not a throughline or characterisation or resolution of those characters and situation. But it is thin. The narrative can be simply stated:

Styx loses Stephanie to Kirby; there are those inside and those outside; those inside have the illusion of safety and those outside carry threat, but appearances are not reality.

It is a play on the old idea of the musical: boy loses girl; girl gets other boy; first boy is proven right but no one wins the girl. The nature of the throughline is different - there is the use of repetition, extension and variation, and time manipulation that breaks through

expectations of linearity and perplexes. But there is a narrative line, it is simply not the same complex throughline of drama from other perspectives. Does this make it any less satisfying or complete? Perhaps. I also makes it different and underlines the need to approach all drama with a clear understanding of its contexts. The judgements we then choose to make should be, at least, informed.

The depth of the narrative lies in the implicit complexity, not the apparent complexity. The narrative alludes to mythology but doesn't explain it; the action accepts concepts such as street kids, drug culture, etc rather than explains or fleshes them out as if the audience might have difficulty understanding them. These elisions in narrative structure are a problem for people who want to a spoonfed television generation who need resolution in a short time frame.

The dynamic of the group devised piece is different from the well-made play penned by the dominant playwright (with maybe a partner) and delivered through _a traditional, hierarchic system. The group devising process shapes a different sort o! performance piece. Group devised plays are more anarchic, free-form, associational, energetic, tension ridden and driven. They produce narratives of different sorts, derived from within other frames of reference.

Is this just a sign of these particular times - this so called Generation X-ness?

Maybe~ !hough I suspect there are deeper and more interesting, a recognition of the shift ~rom the traditional generational impatience - once cutely called the generation gap - to a more significant expectation from young people, a demand and assertion that they have a right to be heard. As the century has passed there has been a drift towards a different perception

of youth as a concept. As inexorable commercial and media forces have created and invented teenager-hood, so there has been a corresponding growth and acceptance of the idea that this is not just natural and right but expected and mandatory.

The dialogue in this piece does reflect soap opera qualities. In its predictability and triteness there are some hints of the role models and values of the society of young people. In a so-called post modernist society, there is also a questioning of a need for dialogue to be original and novel; there is a reliance on tried and tested language patterns perhaps underlining a need for familiarity and safety in unsafe times. The attempts to heighten the language through the use of repetition, vocal patterning, chorus work and what some call poetic diction, is an interesting response to a world where that very soap opera predictability is the dominant mode. ( And, it is interesting to note how few commented on this aspect of the Here! Now! project!) But there is a tension in this dramatic text between the intention and the result is the dialogue and language simply a reflection of what exists or a questioning. Is this piece a mirror held up to reality? Or does it attempt - and perhaps fail - to be something else?

Similarly, in world where realism is the dominant form of story telling - through film and television - it is interesting to see plays where this approach is questioned. The disjointing of reality in this piece is notable.

Traditionally, fin de siecle society is typified as lethargy, longueurs, entropic looking back through rose or jaundice coloured glasses. By contrast, Here!Now! shows an energy, a commitment, even a fervour that questions such a mannered and stylised approach. When you see the sense of passion and diversity in the face of the blandness of life around them, you can understand the impatience and underlying anger. As the world around them becomes homogenised, globalised and generally duller - the economic imperatives driving the social fabric into designer but duller mass production, is it any wonder that there is a sense of rebellion fuelled by

anger.

When the dramatic text produced is examined closely, it is interesting to draw the parallels. with the ideas and values of playwrights/directors like Brecht who over fifty years ago was advocating a similar dislocation of the conventions of drama m search of awakening the audience. In Brechtian drama, there is a deliberate introduction of distancing elements such as songs, fragments and incompleteness, the use of music, stylised setting and properties, episodes rather than scenes, and a deliberate move away from seeking catharsis. Similar elements are strongly present in Here! Now!

Developing this line .of :thought about the Here! Now! project is not to turn a blind eye to its limitations. Questions I continue to ask include:

• Has _the project been so inward looking that it merely delivers another version of teenage angst?

• Has !here been a narrowing of perceptions to the known, the safely predictable?

• Have the choices made been a reconfirmation of existing prejudices or narratives rather than a genuine opening up of possibilities?

• Has the repetition, use of predictable dialogue and situations been a limiting rather than liberating factor?

• Could there have been a more satisfying approach to characterisation and narrative throughline?

The answers will vary according to your frame of reference.

Reaching towards some conclusions

Education is paradoxically both notoriously conservative and dangerously visionary - and often both at the same time. The Arts are also.

Is this production a sign of something new and visionary? Or is it a blind alley at a time of great societal uncertainty and upheaval.

It is appropriate that dramatic texts such as Here! Now! do question and debate traditional forms and ways of working. However, equally do we want to repeat the abject aridity of that great experiment of English without literature, language without enriched contexts?

While it sounds like having a two bob bet each way, there is a place for education to both affirm and question. In affirming the value of conservative approaches, education recognises the strengths of traditions and past contexts. In looking forward, we recognise that arts education is a powerful opportunity to engage with new technologies and ways of telling. If we don't recognise the past, we abdicate the long trajectory of learning. If we aren't involved in the debate about new ways of structuring, we don’t have the credentials - the street cred - to critique them.

The reviews and reactions of many to this project has been an interesting insight into the limitations of some of those looking - and perhaps, equally, of some of those participating and shaping. It is perhaps typical of this Generation X approach to leave the issue unresolved with a metaphoric and stereotypical, frustrating, youthful shrug of the shoulders. But we should not read this as a sign of disinterest. Behind the carefully cultivated veneer of the young, their apparent insouciant lack of caring is a passionate and burnmg need to be heard and understood. They simply cannot be dismissed. Projects such as Here! Now! have a place, a right and need to be taken seriously - from their own frames of reference.

4 April 1996

Drama Tuesday - The past empowers us for the present

 In 1994 Wayne Fairhead was keynote speaker at The NADIE (National Association for Drama in Education – now Drama Australia) National Conference in Perth. Wayne spoke from his experience of drama education in Ontario, Canada but also from a local perspective as he was once a local lad. 

In 2021, as drama educators in Australia face a Review of the Australian Curriculum: The Arts being conducted by ACARA the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, it is timely to reconsider some of the ideas that Wayne spoke about back in 1994. There are powerful resonances 

Curriculum is in a state of profound and constant change all around the world. We are being asked to be totally accountable by a society that sees our tasks in contradictory terms. Hence the jargon and whatever you want to call these action objectives – learning outcomes, standards, targets, etc. As teachers I think one feels powerless when changes happened so suddenly and then so called experts suggest a seemingly new direction.

Educators who tackle restructuring are caught in a time warp between the old and the new. On the one hand teacher teachers are being asked to teach the students to think – to forsake superficial coverage of content for depth and understanding. On the other hand they are still judged publicly and privately by standardised tests that emphasise isolated facts, wrote learning and content coverage.

I am hoping that we can find ways of sharing Wayne’s whole keynote with the wider drama education community. His theme was EMPOWERMENT AND A CHANGING CURRICULUM. 

I don’t think that what effective teachers, and I mean drama teacher specifically, actually do in their classroom needs to change all that dramatically. What we have to learn to accept is firstly to live with ambiguity and secondly develop an ability to clearly state what it is we expect our students will learn. The ambiguity is not going to go away – change is too rapid and individual countries do not control their economies. No one has all the answers therefore the team becomes increasingly more important. We can only solve problems together locally nationally and internationally. This is where I wish to affirm the statement that NADIE is “pulling a lot of strings” at the moment. It is! Here in Oz you are indeed lucky. You are a national team to be reckoned with. In Canada it’s a constant struggle because of the regionalism that exists. 

And so where do learning outcomes fit into all of this-the empowerment process and ongoing curriculum change. They are an attempt to CLARIFY what it is we do in our classrooms. They endeavour to provide an OPEN agenda for students. 

The focus on students is a timely reminder. 

There is so much more in Wayne’s keynote (which I re-found in a fax from him after the conference and which I have now transcribed for, hopefully, another generation). 

There are many connections with Wayne as he visits his family here (when – in pre-COVID-19 times – he could) and we met on many occasions around the world through IDEA. In 2004 Wayne was the Director of the IDEA Congress in Ottawa, Canada and continues his life long support for drama education.  

It is important that we do not lose sight of the shared wisdom of the past particularly when it can enlighten us about the present and future. 

And the peacocks that rule the roost in The New Fortune, still parade themselves across the stage as a descant on Hamlet’s lament for Poor Yorick. And my sad commentary on what the University has lost. 

The New Fortune Theatre, University of Western Australia

A different Drama Tuesday

Why I am a teacher. Why am I teacher?

During my first year in teacher education I found myself sitting across from a troubled young student. Anxiety was written in his sweaty body language, the tightly drawn breaths and the lacing of his fingertips as he dodged around the reason for his visit: he was struggling to write the first assignment in EDN101 Intro to Teaching. The task was a gentle recount of something from his own schooling that had left an indelible mark on his own decision to become a teacher. This topic was something that I could relate to as it was a question I had asked myself often.

“I can’t think of anything to write…” he muttered before trailing off into indefinite silence. 

I wanted to help so I offered some suggestions but his answers were desultory and noncommittal.

Tell me about where you went to school. In the country

What were your teachers like? They were OK, I guess.

Were you a good student? Guess so, about average. I always did what i was told. My mum made sure of that.

Why do you want to become a teacher? Mum thought it would be a good idea. Dad told me that it was a good job, steady. Lots of holidays. Good pay.

So you want to be a teacher? Nup. 

Impasse. I searched in my backpack of conversation topics to see if we could move on.

Tell me a bit more about school. Was there something you were good at in school? Sport. 

OK, tell me about that. I thought that being a PE teacher would be good. Always out on the oval, moving about. Couldn’t sit long in a desk. Hated doing head stuff and reading. But I could see myself doing that. I was pretty good at running and OK at footy and the health stuff was OK, bit sexy scary but it was interesting…

Something seemed to have switched on for him. Words flowed.

There was this one time, we had a lightning carnival. Our little District High went to the Senior High in the next big town and I was in the relay team. It was a blustery down south sort of day but OK and we won the relay which was right at the end of the competition. In fact, it was the very last event and the PE teacher made us get on the bus as soon as the race was finished and the cup was handed over. I was so happy. But it had been a busy day and after lunch i was too nervous to go to the toilet and had run the race with a full bladder, thinking I could go before I got on the bus. But that didn’t happen, did it (he added with a discomforting shiver of his spine).

She made us get on the bus, quick. Grab your things and get on there. I was still holding the trophy, a big silver cup and plonked it down on the seat beside me. The back of the bus had the usual gaggle of girls laughing and making jokes. The rest of the boys were sat at the fort of the bus because the teacher wanted to keep an eye on them because they caused trouble. So I was sitting halfway down the bus. It was OK at first, as we chugged out of the town and onto the highway. It was even OK when the other PE teacher driving the bus, ground through the gears and bunny hopped into cruising speed. But i knew I was in trouble.

I was desperate to pee. It really hurt. I asked the teacher and she said, Tie a knot in it, buddy! I pretended to look out the window at the green but couldn’t think of a helpless sense of agony. I tried looking out the window at the flicking by of the Tuarts and trying to ignore the rowdy shouting and the noisy joking in the bus that was starting to fog up the windows. I squirmed one way, then another. I crossed my legs. I tried thinking of other things – winning the race – but that only made it feel worse.

I scrabbled around in my bag in case there was an empty drink container. It would be desperate I know but I simply had to go. I looked at the plastic bag that mum had sent my lunch in, but it was too flimsy. I thought about opening the window of the bus, but those girls behind me would see. There was only one thing for it. The silver trophy was on the seat beside me. Trying to look casual, I slid it towards me and quietly, checking to see no one was looking … 

The relief was immediate.

I would have gotten away with it, but at that moment the bus slid into a turn and there was a clanking of silver cup against the back of the next seat. The PE teacher who was standing near the boys at the front of the bus, looked up quickly and was catapulted a couple of steps down the busy towards me. Her face said it all. She noticed the slopping yellow liquid, and my startled face looking up at her wide eyes. You dirty little bugger! And then everyone else on the bus was looking with questioning eyes. That’s disgusting, you little animal!, she said. Can’t you control your animal instincts! Her eyes had that look of disgust.

His narrative stopped now. He looked away and down, ashamed. Then he whispered mostly to himself. Bitch. She didn’t need to have called me that. I hate her. She can stuff her PE teaching.

I let the moment settle, waiting.

Why don’t you write about that? Mum would kill me, if I did that. 

Do you think so? I know so. I can tell, even now. She had to go up to the school to get me after the bus got back. They rang her from the bus. 

I still think you should write about it for your assignment. Not gonna happen. 

He left my study with a shrugged shoulders at an offer to help him write it. Soon after, he left the teaching course. It might be something that happened a long time ago but I still remember it powerfully. 

Was it a good decision for him to leave teaching? Impossible to know. Could I have done more to help him at this moment in his teacher education journey? There are no second guesses in teaching. When you think about it, his telling of the story and his sense of outrage of his own teachers might have given him the necessary empathy to be a great teacher. Or, may be it was the right decision for him to leave his course.

I am happy to share with you that I came into teaching determined that I would make teaching better than my own schooling. The casual brutalism of the daily plying of power and status of my own teachers resonated with this student’s experiences. I know it was judgmental and naive of me to be so dismissive of the parade of tired middle aged men who taught me. Their sarcasm that passed for wit ran hand in hand with their occasionally physical violence. And it is easy to say that was then and now we do things differently. But do we? As teachers are we kinder than those teachers from my past? i hope so. I hope that we are, but when I hear stories like this one, I see the old soft shoe shuffle of power and status holds the spotlight. 

One thing I have come to recognise is that we all somehow live out the unfulfilled ambitions of our parents. My mother, who lived through the Great Depression and a World War, wanted to be a teacher but couldn’t do so.  Therefore it is not surprising that she gently pushed me in that direction. But there was something more than that wish fulfilment to my decision to go into teaching. I was angry about my own education: the narrowness and aridity; the power plays between teachers and amongst students; the dullness. There had to be something more. I trained my eye to observe and notice. To be aware of the undertow of people and relationships and how that shaped learning. I teach because it is about being human, being alive, being wide-awake to the world (thank you Maxine Greene). As that young man in my study taught me: every moment is a learning occasion. 

Learning lies at the heart of teaching.

Drama Term Tuesday - A modest book proposal

Drama Learning and Teaching Theories Untangled – and how to use them

With tongue in cheek I make a serious proposal for a new book about Drama Learning and Teaching.  I am inspired to do so because I came across, a book by Bob Bates with an intriguing  title Learning theories simplified : and how to apply them to teaching (2019). In a couple of pages, he sketches succinct summaries of key theories and theorists of education. It’s a roller coaster ride through over 100 theories organised around Classical Learning Theories and Contemporary Thinking About Teaching and Learning. The reader switchbacks through Socrates, Plato (Shadows of reality), Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Dewey, Sartre, Freire and many more. Theories of Behaviourism, Cognitivism, Humanism, Neurolism and more rattle by. It’s not quite the comic book style, but it is a quick and useful reader with focused, point-by-point summaries for understanding and applying the array of approaches used in education. It explains and uses analogies to help understand concepts.It encourages critical engagement and  further reading. It’s worth a look.

My book proposal is to identify the key learning and teaching approaches for drama education.

Who are the people who have shaped drama teaching and learning?

What are the theories of drama education?

What is a theory in this context?

A theory is a systematic explanation of an approach; a set or principles; sometimes a justification.

Why are theories important?

If drama teaching is to be something more than collection of activities, tricks of the trade, games or schemes of work, it needs to be underpinned by a coherent explanation. That is not to make the case for the “theory of everything” – a single all encompassing master framework. We have come to realise that there are many ways of conceptualising and applying drama education as a field (As Hamlet reminded us: There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.). When you think about it, the cross currents of approaches have shaped our contemporary practice.

It is however, important that we work in our drama workshops with an informed sense of context and history. We need to be something more than teacher technicians, following patterns set by others without thinking or understanding why we do what we do. What are the Big Ideas? Whose practice shifted conventional ways of doing things, set trends, gave us seminal concepts and even specific strategies? What are the dominant practices and their counterpoints?

Each drama teacher needs to articulate their philosophy or approach of drama teaching and how they understand their students learn drama. They need to acknowledge the influencers and forces that shape their day-to-day practice. They need to name and explain their drama teaching.

Why would this be a good idea?

There’s nothing like it that I have come across that provides a panoramic view of drama education.

But, there are some important cautions to this proposal.

• Naming theories and knowing them for their own sake doesn’t help make us great drama teachers. Nor is putting some particular theorists on a pedestal (or consigning some of them to Dante’s Inferno) isn’t helpful. What we need is reflective, critical engagement with theories.

• A theory exists in the context of practice – knowing and doing are hand-in-hand in the sort of embodied learning that we value in contemporary drama education. It makes little sense to treat theory and practice as mutually exclusive.

• Theories and theorists are not set in stone (or reducible to slogans). We need to remember that people and their drama practice change and develop over time. We need to ovoid ossifying ideas and practice. We need to let theories breathe, grow, change, adapt and emerge.

Who is on my initial list of theorists and theories?

That opens a can of worms, when you ask that question.

But to start the conversation I suggest the following knowing that there will be some important ones missed. In no particular order:

Dorothy Heathcote. Brian Way, Winifred Ward, Viola Spolin, Cecily O’Neill, Richard Courtney, David Booth, Comenius, Harriet Findlay Johnson, Henry Caldwell Cook, Brecht, Stanislavski, Gavin Bolton, Jonathon Neelands, Juliana Saxton, Carole Tarlington, John O’Toole, Keith Johnstone, Pam Bowell, Patrice Baldwin, Brian Heap? Madonna Stinson? Peter Duffy, Peter Wright?

And what of the types of practice we should include:

Improvisation, Process Drama, Story Drama, Script Interpretation. Verbatim Theatre, Chamber Theatre…? What about Children’s Dramatic Play? Teacher-in-role? Mantle of the Expert?

But, where are the European voices? The Scandinavian leaders? The voices from North and South America? USA? Canada, Australia, New Zealand? Where are the voices from history? 

Is it even possible to assemble a starting list? 

We won’t know until we start.

There’s a heap of work to go on developing this proposal. But it would be an interesting challenge. 

Who would you nominate as seminal theorist/practitioners for drama education?

What theories, theorists and practices are important?

How much do we need to know about each?

Join me in this new adventure.

Bibliography

Bates, B. (2019). Learning theories simplified : ....and how to apply them to teaching (2nd Edition). London: Sage.

Drama Tuesday - Looking beyond the Flood

In the last week I have presented a keynote for the newly established Drama and Theatre Education Alliance  (https://dtealliance.wixsite.com/dtea) in the United Kingdom.

On July 15 the Alliance staged the Big Drama and Theatre Education Debate: Getting our act together. I have re-recorded my keynote and share it.

Looking beyond the Flood

Big Drama and Theatre Education Debate: Getting our act together

July 15 2020

Robin Pascoe,

President IDEA International Drama/Theatre and Education Association, Honorary Fellow, Murdoch University.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today and warmest wishes from the wider IDEA community to all in Drama, Theatre and Education. 

I have lost track of the times we are told that we live in “an age of innovative disruption” (see, for example, Bower & Christensen, 1995). The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic amplifies disruption in politics, technology, society, education in schools and universities. Our current moment of disruption presents both threats and opportunities. It also highlights fissures and divisions of the past. It calls for healing and looking beyond the flood.

You may have seen my recent post about the situation in Greece where the Ministry of Education announced the weekly program for upper secondary education for the new school year 2020-2021 and has eliminated the arts completely (http://www.stagepage.com.au/blog). There are threats in the ways that people are responding to the current Pandemic.

Each of us sees our realities through our autobiographies. In the world of drama and theatre education there are good news stories and sad news stories. In some places of the world, like Iceland and Taiwan, drama is embedded in the primary school. In Finland, despite a concerted long-term campaign by FIDEA, the Finnish association, drama has yet to be included in the curriculum. In my role in IDEA I see encouraging signs of remarkable growth in drama education happening in China and Turkey alongside contraction and denial elsewhere in the world. The promise of the Seoul Agenda on Arts Education (UNESCO, 2010), that was endorsed by all UNESCO members, has yet to be realised as an entitlement. The situation addressed in your Manifesto ("Drama, Theatre and Young People's Manifesto," 2020) highlights a local perspective with global implications.

It’s worth mentioning a little about the situation in Australia. 

Australia does have the Australian Curriculum: The Arts (ACARA, 2014). Drama Australia (https://dramaaustralia.org.au/0 ) has provided a unified voice for drama education. The National Advocates for Arts Education NAAE (https://naae.org.au) thrives as a network of peak national professional arts and arts education associations who represent arts educators across Australia. 

But … there’s always a but, isn’t there!

Implementation of the Australian Curriculum is, constitutionally, vested in the States and Territories. In my own state of Western Australia the decision has been made to “adopt and adapt” the national document. Similarly, other states have made local interpretations of the mandate. The scope of the promised entitlement is narrowed or changed. 

There is also the underlying question of implementation. Writing an Arts and Drama curriculum is one thing (Don’t forget this is not the first go we have had at doing this in Australia (2007; 1994)), successfully implementing that curriculum for every Australian student is a challenge.  As the evidence of two national reviews of arts education undertaken a relatively long time ago now (2008; 2005), what happens in schools may not reflect the written curriculum. Having the Australian Curriculum: The Arts published is only valuable when we can confidently say that all Australian students have a delivered arts curriculum that includes drama.

There is in Australia also evidence of contraction in drama teacher education across Australian universities that are reeling as they re-invent themselves in the current pandemic (though the writing has been on the wall of the rise of managerialist leadership and political interference (Hellyer & Jennings, May 28 2020). The decisions made in my own university to de-couple Arts and Drama and Education by locating them in different colleges is a sign of the times. The decision to double the cost of Arts degrees, made recently by the Australian Government (19 June 2020), further erodes the position of drama education.

Returning to an international perspective, it is useful to consider some of the possible reasons why as a drama education community we have reached this point. 

Why is drama education sometimes still considered extracurricular? 

Why is drama in schools sometimes considered suspect? 

Why isn’t our vision for drama and arts education widely shared?

Perhaps we need to look back at or collective histories and speculate. 

In the minds of many, drama education is aligned with “progressive education” (see, for example, Dewey, 1938 and many others).  The tenor of the times when drama education began to flourish it was alongside embodied commitment to greater informality in classrooms and relationships between teachers and students; broader curriculum; practical activities; flexibility of teaching procedures; diversity; focus on individual child and a balance of academic and social and emotional learning. There was also strong commitment to critical and socially-engaged teaching and learning. These notions challenge a politicised educational climate

The opposition to including drama in the school curriculum entitlement is often based on assumptions and prejudices and even misconceptions.  It is always useful to identify some of the misconceptions about our field and to question the fear and loathing that drives some political curriculum choices. 

Eggen and Kauchak (2013) observe, “misconceptions are constructed; they’re constructed because they make sense to the people who construct them; and they are often consistent with people’s prior knowledge or experiences” (p. 195).  Pointing out a misconception, simply labelling it as “wrong” or “flawed thinking”, is of limited use. People who change their thinking and practice need: 

• viable, alternative experiences that disrupt their mis-conceptualised understandings

• to see how that changed understanding is useful in the real world

• to see how applying their revised thinking to new situation actually produces desired results

• to have their revised world view valued and endorsed by peers and the school community

• to see that students are learning differently, with higher levels of approval and satisfaction and with better outcomes or results

• to see that parents and the community support what is different.

How are we, as a community of practice, challenging misconceptions?

I remind us all that our greatest asset is our art form as a change agent. With that in mind I invite you to imagine an unfolding process drama from a new pre-text Littlelight by Kelly Canby (2020). 

In the grey old town of Littlelight, a “big beautiful wall” surrounded the town. The wall was thick and all encompassing and the Mayor was strong .But one day a brick was missing in the wall. And no one noticed at first, but little by little, brick by brick, gaps appeared in the wall. And there were streaks of neon light fingering their way into the town. Who could be stealthily breaching the wall? 

What happens when the walls that are built are breached?

You can continue the metaphors of this process drama in your imaginations. 

Imagine how powerful our process drama could be in bringing about change.

What we need is to navigate our way through these disruptive times keeping our drama compass tracking true.

I began by invoking an image of the Flood. and return to it conclude.

Jackson Browne sang in Before the Deluge (1995) of a world of dreamers and fools “in the troubled years that came before the deluge”. But he also sang of a time beyond the flood:

Let the music keep our spirits high

Let the buildings keep our children dry

Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by

When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

We need to keep our eyes beyond the horizon, beyond the flood.

Thank you. 

Bibliography

ACARA. (2014). The Australian Curriculum: The Arts. Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/the-arts/introduction

Bower, J. L., & Christensen, C. M. (1995). Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave. Harvard Business Review, 73(1 (January–February)), 43–53. 

Browne, J. (1995). Before the Deluge (Lyrics). Retrieved from https://www.lyrics.com/lyric/2846364/Jackson+Browne

Canby, K. (2020). Littlelight. Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Press.

Cultural Ministers Council (CMC), & Ministerial Council on Education Employment and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA). (2007). National Statement on Education and the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.cmc.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/7366/National_Education_and_the_Arts_Statement_-_September_2007.pdf

Dewey, J. (1938). Experience & Education. New York, NY: Kappa Delta Pi.

Diana Davis, & Australia Council for the Arts. (2008). First We See: The National Review of Visual Education. Retrieved from http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/research/education_and_the_arts/reports_and_publications/first_we_see_the_national_review_of_visual_education

Drama, Theatre and Young People's Manifesto. (2020). Retrieved from https://dtealliance.wixsite.com/dtea/manifesto

Eggen, P., & Kauchak, D. (2013). Educational Psychology: Windows on Classrooms, Ninth Edition. Boston: Pearson.

Emery, L., & Hammond, G. (1994). A Statement on the arts for Australian Schools. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation (Australia)/Australian Education Council.

Hellyer, M., & Jennings, P. (May 28 2020). Our universities must rethink their broken business model or risk failure. Canberra Times. Retrieved from https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/6771137/our-universities-must-rethink-their-broken-business-model-or-risk-failure/

Karp, P. (19 June 2020). Australian university fees to double for some arts courses, but fall for Stem subjects. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jun/19/australian-university-fees-arts-stem-science-maths-nursing-teaching-humanities

Pascoe, R., Leong, S., MacCallum, J., MacKinley, E., Marsh, K., Smith, B., . . . Winterton, A. (2005). Augmenting the Diminished: National Review of School Music Education. Retrieved from Canberra: 

UNESCO. (2010). Seoul Agenda: Goals for the Development of Arts Education. Retrieved from http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=41117&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html